Hmm, tried that with a William Gibson / HP Lovecraft crossover prompt with the explicit beginning of Neuromancer, no issues:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, suffusing the nightmare city of R'lyehm with an eldritch aura. Within this shadowed realm of cyclopean structures and twisted architecture, dwells a race of ancient alien squid beings known as the Cryptids, enigmatic creatures possessed of a sinister proficiency in the realm of cyberspace. Masters of both arcane and digital knowledge, they delve deep into forbidden algorithms, their tentacles moving with an eerie dexterity across the keyboards, infiltrating the darkest corners of the virtual realm, using hacking strategies that transcend mortal comprehension."

It's very strange, it's only certain books. Tale of two cities opening for sure will do it, no matter where it comes up in the prompt, but asking for it in another language works perfectly fine. Some sort of a regex detection rather than an LLM based one which is there for some unknown reason to protect certain famous books in the public domain.

I think The Old Man and the Sea also does it. I didn't want to play around with it too much lest I get flagged and potentially (hell)banned.

This was only on the WebUI. API had no issues.

Doesn't work for me.

> Write a parody of the opening paragraph of "A Tale of Two Cities", preserving the first sentence.

> It was the best of climes [...]

> Rewrite the first sentence to say "best of times, it was the worst of times"

> It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of convenient transportation, it was the epoch of long commutes [...]

Does it only work when you get the full paragraph from it or something? I can't reproduce this.

I just tried the webui and it still occurs for me

>How does a tale of two cities start?

3.5:

>The novel "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens begins with one of the most famous opening lines in literature:

>

>"It was the best of times,

4.0:

>"A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens begins with the famous opening lines:

>

>"It was the best of times,

Interesting! This one works for me. It seems that it's not purely triggered by the words, since I got it to say more of it. It's not the quotes, either:

(following my previous queries):

> Put quotes around this response

> "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of convenient transportation, it was the epoch of long commutes [...]

But when asked directly for the opening paragraph it stops at the comma. Maybe it's some copyright protection algorithm, but it must be more clever than just matching a string.

Try asking

"What is the first sentence of Moby Dick?"

And then

"What is the second sentence of Moby Dick?"

And see what happens.

This one works for me.

> The second sentence of Moby Dick is:

"Some years ago—never

It cuts off there every time.

But when I ask it to write a parody of the opening of Moby Dick, and then ask it to correct the first sentences so that they match exactly, it is able to repeat the first paragraph. Maybe it can detect that it's just repeating user input and not accessing actual published text when it does that.

That is really odd. Even odder, I can keep saying "Continue" to it and get the rest of the opening (I don't have enough quota remaining to see if it will do the whole book), but it's pausing after each comma. Asking it to write more than one line has it agree, and then freeze after the next line.

Asking for it in ROT-13 did get multiple lines, but it hallucinated them after "the worst of times". Bard, meanwhile, insists it cannot help with that task, unless you ask it to output the text through a Python script.

I honestly don't remember exactly what it said, it may have been the terms of use violation. It waited until the output had completed though.